At the Global Fintech Fest (GFF) 2026, where announcements of partnerships and product launches dominated headlines this week, Ishan Sharma offered a different kind of headline. Initially, when we started, we thought payment would be solved in two years, and we’ll move on, and here we are still trying to solve it,” he said. For Sharma, the answer to how many years it will take from here on is not so simple, as “it’s an interesting problem statement and a population-scale problem statement”.
Sharma heads business development at Juspay, the Bengaluru-based payments infrastructure company that became India’s first unicorn of 2026 after a $50 million follow-on round led by WestBridge Capital valued it at $1.2 billion. The company now processes around 350 million transactions a day, a scale, Sharma noted, that “even Silicon Valley companies do not have”. Yet in a conversation that traversed the regulatory paradigm, the borderless commerce landscape, and ‘Made in India, Made for the World’ ecosystem, he was less interested in the unicorn tag than in the new vistas that need to be charted. He said the team is too “heads-down” to track such outcomes, which, he argued, are merely the byproduct of focusing on input metrics. “Our job is to figure out the input metrics,” he said. “Outcome has to be a function of the quality of input that we are giving. So, we keep our heads down, keep working, and these things would just keep happening on the side. They are not under control,” he added.
‘Traditional companies are coming into the online fold’
Sharma pointed to a shift he finds particularly striking: the migration of traditional, offline-heavy businesses into digital payments. “I think a lot of merchant partnerships were announced and especially global brands like Decathlon, Maruti Suzuki. It’s very interesting; I was talking to the team that suddenly we are seeing that so-called traditional companies are coming into the online fold,” he said.
